The Boy (5 page)

L
uckily, there was the pinky promise.

“What’s a pinky promise?” the boy asked.

“An inviolable oath.”

“What inviolable oath?”

“You can’t come over.”

“I can’t?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

So they arranged to meet at his house, a three-bedroom place at the opposite end of town. He opened the door and Anna stepped into chaos so dark and primitive she started taking pictures.

“Why are you taking pictures?” asked the roommate, a tall, willowy specimen with erratic facial hair and no pigmentation. Anna aimed her phone at a pile of dishes by the sink. The boy came out of the shower.

“She’s taking pictures,” the roommate said. Anna captured a stratum of toothpaste around the bathroom sink.

“Jack, she’s taking pictures.”

“Why are you taking pictures?”

Balanced on one arm of the couch, Anna shot the mother of all spiderwebs.

“Dude, I’m not sure I want her around, taking pictures like this.”

“Put that thing away,” the boy said, so she stepped down and took one last picture of him and his dragon, both still wet from the shower.

They were still in bed when she asked him why he’d dropped out of college. The boy flipped onto his back.

“I’d had enough. Psychology 101? Please. We’re running out of potable water.”

“So you aim to dig wells?”

“I don’t aim to dig wells, no. I aim to ride my bike, I aim to ski, I aim to surf, I aim to paraglide. I aim to live. That’s what I aim to do:
live
.”

“What happens when we run out of water?”

“I trade my bike for a shovel and the rest for a gun.”

For a second Anna was tempted to instruct the young man in the way things used to be, to lay out before his astonished eyes the entirely logical expectation that—barring exceptional circumstances typically to do with previously accumulated wealth—the new generations would enter the workforce as soon as humanly possible and contribute, through the acquisition of financial security, to the progress of the human race. It took only the briefest look in the boy’s direction to determine the crushing futility of
any
instruction, no matter the type.

“I don’t know,” she said. “A degree is a degree.”

“A degree is not what I was put on this planet for.”

“I see. What were you put on this planet for?”

“Right now,” he said, rolling on top of her, “for you.” And while the attention pleased her, Anna couldn’t help but privately lament the transformation of an entire generation of would-be men into drifters and vagabonds.

She’d had the conversation with Richard Strand, of all people. He’d married at age twenty-five. By age twenty-seven, he’d held his first son in his arms. Richard Strand came from money but, still, upon marriage he’d secured a job at a bank and brought in his first paycheck. Later he’d opened a restaurant, worked eighteen-hour days, cajoled waitstaff and dishwashers, upgraded to a full liquor license, brought in chefs, changed menus, made big bucks.

“It was never a thought,” he’d said to her, “never a thought that you wouldn’t get a job and work your ass off. You had to work your ass off. You had to make money. You had a wife who wasn’t making any money. You had a kid who was a couple decades away from making any money. You had to make money. Then women started making money and look what happened.”

“Drifters,” said Anna.

“Vagabonds,” said Richard Strand.

Later that day, Anna and Ree examined the contents of six photographs on Anna’s phone. Ree shook her head. “I’d get a tetanus shot before going back in, man.”

“It’s like the apocalypse, the second coming. What kind of person manifests this kind of mayhem?”

“A kid who just dropped out of college?”

“I don’t know. I nearly dropped out of college. No place I ever lived in looked remotely like this.”

“He’s a guy. A guy living with two other guys. What are they like, by the way?”

“Major overachievers. Future pillars of the community. One picks up trash for a living, the other one grooms dogs.”

“What about him?”

“He waits tables.” They sat in silence as a shot of primordial slime on the living room carpet faded slowly to black.

“Why did he drop out?”

“We’re running out of potable water.”

Ree gave her a long, uncritical look. “I get it,” she said, “I get it. What’s he going to do with a degree in accounting when we end up with no water?”

“What’s he going to do with his bike?”

“Same thing as a degree in accounting,” said Ree, “but after a shit ton of fun.”

At home, Esperanza and Eva had the cleaning channel on. “Mamma, you need to get Espi Mop & Glo.”

Suddenly attuned to the elapsing nature of things, to the brittle ecology of all sanctuaries, Anna was quick to acquiesce. She needed these two sitting on the couch, she needed the improbable blues and oranges of the cleaning channel, she needed the dog staring miserably from under his brown cap with holes for his ears, she needed them inside with her and the rest of it outside, cast out, banished like the dark to the outer edges of her property, where the coyotes skulked and screamed and a wolf had once made a ghostly appearance in the middle of a storm, sitting immobile for hours under a thickening mantle of snow.

“I don’t like tomatoes,” Eva said at dinner, and Anna nearly gave her little girl a standing ovation, so in keeping with tradition was the objection.

“Eat your dinner,” Esperanza said, spearing a fingerling potato and examining it from every angle and in this way confirming the solidity of their arrangement, the fixity of time and space within the narrow confines of their dining room.

“What did you do today?” Eva asked in her little voice. Esperanza, whom Anna had burdened with a full confession, shot Anna a quick look but said nothing.

Fork in midair, Anna stared. “What did I do?”

Eva raised her eyes. “Yes. What did you do?”

“Don’t ask your mother what she did,” said Esperanza. “It’s none of your business what your mother did.”

Eva looked from one to the other. “Don’t ask her? She’s my
mother
.”

“That don’t mean nothing,” Esperanza said, and in the silence that fell, for the first time since the big move out West, past and future failed to meet in the present. Separated by a crack lengthening with a low lament down the dinner table, the past stood as a monument to clarity and congruity while the future began to twist and turn darkly upon itself like some shapeless thing come to exact some price. What could Anna say? I
feasted
on a human body? I sank my hands wrist-deep into a human heart and suffered the same encroachment in return? I traced the outlines of a boy’s dragon with my tongue? I died a thousand deaths so I could come back to life?

“Mom.”

“What?”

“I want to know what you did today.”

Anna looked at Esperanza, whose inspection of the potato was far from over, cleared her lungs, speared her own potato, and said, “I went to the movies.”

“The movies? What did you see?”

“What did I see?”

Eva nodded, her eyes bright.

“I saw
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“That movie is, like, a hundred years old.”

“It was a retrospective.”

“What’s a retrospective?”

“When they show old things. They’re showing all the Indiana Jones movies.”

Eva’s eyes lit up. “Can I go? I want to go.”

“It was the last one.”

“But that’s the first one.”

“They went backward.”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“You’re lying.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Why would I lie?”

“I don’t know.”

Esperanza put her fork down. “Who’s coming to Sonic?”

“Me!” yelled Eva.

Alone at the dinner table, Anna cradled her forehead with one hand and sat in the pulsating silence of her home, in the whiteness of her empty shell, for a long time before getting up and slowly going to the phone.

“I’ve just lied to Eva for the first time, Mia, a stupid little lie, but a dirty lie nonetheless. After everything the girl’s been through, you’d imagine I’d spare her the indignity, but there you have it. I’m calling because I want your voice mail to record for posterity that I am not going near that boy again. I’m not going to his place, and I’m not having him over. In fact, I’m not having anybody over. Not even you, Mia. If you were to do a Lazarus and come back from the dead or wherever you are, we’d still have to meet for coffee in town.”

And she made good. For days all entreaties went unanswered, access was denied to young and old alike. She switched to herbal tea instead of coffee in the morning, she went to the farmers’ market and purchased a forest of greens that she parceled out to her neighbors the next day. She clipped her toenails and sloughed her feet to avoid further censure from her yoga teacher, who had reluctantly relayed a message from a woman so revolted by Anna’s hooves that she’d quit her practice and left the studio in a rage.

Then Mia called.

“Back from the dead,” said Anna.

“What dead? I was in Brazil.”

“You went to Brazil?”

“You forgot I was going to Brazil?”

“I did. How was Brazil?”

“Full of lovely Brazilians and their lovely children. How’s my angel?”

“Good. She’s running for president of the dog.”

“Tell her she has my vote.”

“I cut my toenails. I sloughed my feet.”

“That should improve your standing for a while.”

Anna smiled. They’d started down the ashtanga yoga path together, Mia progressing smoothly to the end of the first series, Anna cursing her way from injury to injury until the final surrender and the humble new beginning. Mia had moved into the second series by then. She had memorized the name of every posture in Sanskrit and added to her repertoire a lengthy final prayer, also in Sanskrit, whose hypnotic, painfully redemptive closure consisted of the word
shanti
—the peace that surpasseth understanding—chanted three times.

At first Anna had failed to understand. She had practiced in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Santa Fe, and Taos. The ashtanga studios of America were packed with all-star athletes outdoing each other in the name of yoga. Only in her tiny studio on Morada Lane—a single room where orchids bloomed all year round and silence condensed like matter around human breath—had Anna truly rested in the heart of the practice. To the people who came from out of town to dazzle, to impress, her teacher—a lunar creature with eyes like pools of amber—would say, “Lie down. Find your breath. You’ll be doing better yoga that way.”

Mia was a curious blend when she’d shown up. She was clearly unconcerned by the performance of others and yet so obsessed with her own that Anna had looked upon her with some suspicion. It hadn’t taken long to figure out that every extra effort she put into the practice was in the service of a religious ritual, an exercise of absolute devotion. She had a good way of putting it, a solid way of putting it. “Without this practice,” she’d say, “I’d be smashing bottles into the wall.”

Mia had a ridiculously successful marriage, but she also had a thing about Persephone, who was dragged down into the underworld by Hades and there enslaved and raped. Nothing in her childhood suggested exposure to trauma on that level, but Mia was raised on a ranch, in the spare world of horses and cattle, fences and gates, dry manure, constantly rising dust. She was raised in a world where little life moved and where her drawings—pencil first, charcoal later—drew pitying smiles from the women, savage laughter from the men. “You gonna eat that, honey? You gonna
day-gest
that, baby girl? Get the calories you need to pull that gate shut?” And because she’d loved that world, she’d lingered in it far too long—coming out of it a fury.

“Look at that idiot, that knucklehead.”

“Where?”

“Over by the cash register.”

It was early in the morning, not long after they’d first met. The coffee shop was full. Anna squinted and eventually brought into focus a relatively benign-looking man in a pert cowboy hat.

“What did he do?”

“His wife just asked him for twenty bucks and he said no.”

Anna took a second look. The man was putting his money clip away. There didn’t seem to be much in it.

“Here, darlin’,” he said, handing his wife a tall Americano.

Mia shook her head. “Fucking men,” she said.

A couple of weeks later, in the same coffee shop, after enduring a leisurely stare from a total stranger for what had clearly been a minute too long, Mia took the man’s cup of coffee and poured it in the trash. The man jumped out of his seat.

“You got a problem with that?” asked Mia.

“Yeah, I got a problem with that, that’s my fucking coffee, you crazy bitch.”

“Didn’t your momma teach you not to stare? No? She didn’t? Well,
somebody’s got to teach you not to stare.
”

And maybe six months after that, down in Santa Fe, at a stage when Anna had begun to physically maneuver Mia away from all potential offenders, including bent-over old men with walking canes, three lads in suits and ties had watched them come in and strategically positioned themselves next to them at the bar. Anna had purchased a drink and kept her eyes glued to it. Mia had turned to one of the men.

“What are you standing here for?”

“I was thinking we might strike up a conversation.”

“Do I look like I’m in a mood to talk?”

“I can’t tell, honey. It’s kinda dark in here.”

“Do I look like you can call me honey?”

The man had cast around for aid. “I guess not,” he’d said.

“You can call me ‘ma’am.’ And you can leave me the fuck alone.”

Hence, the yoga practice.

“Where’s the boy?” asked Mia.

“In his lair.”

“Doing what?”

Anna sighed. “Fumigating, one would hope.”

“Have you had sex?”

“We have.”

“And?”

“And I’m too old for this shit. I should be sloughing my feet, keeping the peace. Did you really tell me you were going to Brazil?”